This July 7, after President Emmanuel Macron called surprise elections for France’s National Assembly, voters elected a parliament with no overall majority. While polls indicated probable victory for Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN), it was the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) that came first, with 192 of the 577 MPs. As the largest force, the NFP would, according to custom, have been tapped to form a government. On July 23, it nominated Lucie Castets, then a relatively obscure civil servant, for prime minister.

Macron, however, was determined to block the NFP from power. On September 4, he picked the right-winger Michel Barnier as the new premier, sealing an uneasy alliance between the Macronist bloc and the conservative Républicains party. Barnier is a member of the latter, the fifth-biggest force in the lower house, holding just forty-seven seats. Tasked with preserving the president’s agenda, Barnier is now preparing a rigid austerity budget for 2025, including €40 billion of spending cuts and temporary windfall taxes. Yet Barnier’s coalition — which totals just over two hundred seats in the new assembly, far short of the 289 needed for an absolute majority — will need the support of the far right to survive in the months ahead.

Castets cofounded the organization Nos Services Publics, an NGO dedicated to the protection of state-provided services. She sat down with Jacobin’s Harrison Stetler for a discussion on Macron’s refusal to allow her to form a government, Barnier’s agenda, and the political crisis in France.